Re: Ah

Re: Plausible

"we're ALL going for a Donner Kebab or a Vegan Curry". Great comment but I would take it further - the choice was between "a kebab (again)" or "something else". Having opted for "something else" the stag / hen party are then told that they have overwhelmingly rejected all animal-based foodstuffs and *must* go vegan.

"NASA also recruited 13 women who passed the necessary tests but weren't allowed to be considered because they were not test pilots" - cobblers.

Wikipedia is quite clear:

"thirteen American women who, as part of a privately funded program, underwent some of the same physiological screening tests as the astronauts selected by NASA on April 9, 1959 for Project Mercury. [... they] were not part of NASA's astronaut program, never flew in space and never met as a group"

Re: Is it me?

Re: Is it me?

Talking of 1960s - that's when the first fully automatic landing in revenue service took place. So I don't know what "modern autopilot systems are more than capable of flying instrument approaches up to the final few tens of feet above the runway" is all about.

Re: Self-selection

"All the kids who did great in high school writing pong games in BASIC for their Apple II would get to college, take CompSci 101, a data structures course, and when they hit the pointers business their brains would just totally explode, and the next thing you knew, they were majoring in Political Science because law school seemed like a better idea" -

Re: skills shortages

What there is a shortage of is 20-somethings with enough experience to be useful but who are unencumbered by high salary expectations, children, or the realisation that masses of unpaid overtime isn't doing yourself any favours.

Evidence for incapacitated crew?

The known flight path from 01:21 to 02:22 doesn't look like a plane on auto-pilot with an incapacitated crew. Nor does it look like someone trying to get back on the ground. It seems likely to me that it was under control. So why would it not be under control at the time of fuel exhaustion?

BEAM

It's tacked on to the side of the main dwelling... it's constructed differently... it's not intended to be actually lived in... it's about six foot by six foot by twelve... it is quite clearly a shed. I expect Peake will be nabbing it at the first opportunity.

Re: Three months....

Three months....

It was not "expected to work for three months". It was designed and engineered such that the chances of *any* of the sub-systems failing in the first three months was fairly low.

If you take that as the base line, and do the maths, the fact that *most* of it is still working 10 years later is no longer so surprising.

As you probably can't be bothered, I will do it for you.

Let us say that the rover has 20 sub-systems, and we want to be 90% sure that none of them will fail in the first three months. To achieve that, you need to engineer each sub-system such that it has a 99.5% chance of still working after three months. Which means that after ten years, (ignoring wear and tear), it'll have an 80% chance of still working. Which means you can expect about about four out of the twenty subsystems to have stopped working. Which, amazingly enough, despite the fact that I have been using makey-uppy numbers for illustration purposes, is pretty much what we have got.

"Czech company AeroMobil"

Used to live in a flat with a 4.4kW limit. You get used to the idea that you can't run the dishwasher, the kettle and the microwave simultaneously. It's not a big deal. Now I am back in the UK I appreciate having a 100 Amp main fuse, but isn't it a case of over-engineering?

Same as it ever was.

For as long as I can remember, we have always been fifty years away from practical nuclear fusion, twenty years away from running out of oil, and ten years away from Moore's law hitting its physical limits.

'bout 20 years ago I spent six months writing F1 pitlane software. I never saw a racing car. I never even saw F1 data: our data set was from some lesser formula and well out-of-date. And it didn't take me long to realise that I *didn't* want to be one of the guys going on race weekends.

Attn El Reg

The guy's an irrelevant tosser. Please stop wasting my screen pixels with non-stories based on whatever his latest self-aggrandising press release is. Or give me some kind of opt out. And if you're stuck for tech resources, I could code it for you: I wonder whether Mr. Schmitz could?

Funnily enough QNX crossed my mind last night for no good reason. The QNX demo floppy is still one of the most impressive demos I've ever seen. On one single 1.44MB floppy they squeezed an OS, a web server, a browser, a text editor, and some other widgets. And the graphical demos would continue to run glitch-free whatever else you did:

The precedents.

On the other hand when they started doing space walks they discovered that a very high level of physical fitness and strength was required. Basically (until they come up with a redesign of the suits) a pressure suit is a big balloon and doing anything in it requires bending the balloon out of shape - it's hard work.

So, errr, women to stay in the cave, I mean Martian lander, and look after it, and men to go out hunting for food, I mean rocks.